Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (34 page)

I did nothing, frozen in the instant by disbelief and feeling something within me grasped and crushed in the grip of a massive fist of solid, icy coldness that I could not even begin to recognize. I saw my best friend's suddenly ruined face come thrusting towards me, a spray of blood bursting from his ruptured mouth, filling the space between us with a red, wet mist, and then I saw his eyes, wide and terrified, shrieking at me in eloquent silence, begging me to tell him what had happened. Unable to move, I saw his horse begin to spin and carry him away from me, and as he began to topple sideways to the ground I finally saw the arrow that had killed him. It was a heavy, iron-headed war arrow, triple-bladed and wickedly barbed, and it had struck the back of his neck, severing his spine before passing through the cavity of his mouth to shatter his upper front teeth and emerge through the base of his nose.

Even as Lorco pitched forward, and knowing that he would crash head first to the ground, I still had not begun to comprehend what had happened. Then I heard shouting, and saw movement ahead of me, and looked up towards the rear of our train in time to see the man who had shot Lorco preparing to loose another arrow at me. I remained frozen, but fortunately my horse was already reacting uneasily to the panic it sensed in its companion. It reared sideways, tossing its head and whinnying, and I watched the arrow spring from the killer's bow and leap across the intervening space between us to hiss by me so closely that I felt its passing. And now, as my panicky mount spun me around, I saw that our entire party was surrounded and outnumbered by a swarm of strangers, most of them armed with bows. Even as I looked I saw Harga go down with two arrows in him, one of them deep in his skull behind the right ear, having pierced his leather helmet.

"Fool," I remember thinking, seeing the silvery iron helmet hanging from his saddle. "He should know better than that." I should have, too, for my own helmet hung close by my knee, but I was a mere boy, not a soldier, and so I absolved myself.

Then clarity returned and terror threatened to overwhelm me as I saw that I had mere moments in which to save myself or die. I could see six of my companions, not counting Lorco, already sprawled in the dirt of the path, and I saw several of the enemy take note of me sitting there, high up and empty handed on my fine horse. One of them was almost within reach of me by that time, an outstretched hand grasping for my reins. I snatched them myself, barely in time, and pulled them tight, swinging my horse around hard, striking the man with its shoulder and sending him sprawling.

Someone shouted urgently, a warning to someone else to catch me before I could escape, but I was already spurring my horse hard, roweling him viciously in my need to get away from there. Another form leaped up at me, attempting to seize my bridle, but my horse was already surging forward. I kicked out with a savagery born of desperation and the man fell away as the thick, iron-studded sole of my heavy riding boot connected with his ear. I dug with my spurs again and now I could feel the strength of the horse beneath me as he strove to leap away from the gouging torment of the pain in his sides.

Another man leaped at me and was struck and thrust aside by the plunging horse, and a fourth slipped and fell with a cry beneath its trampling hooves. I heard three sharp, whistling sounds that I recognized as close-shot arrows, but I was almost free of the throng by then, with only two men now between me and the bare fields beyond. The man farthest to my right had a bow, and as I saw him he brought the weapon up and sighted towards me. Acting purely on instinct, I let go my reins, seized a handful of mane in each fist and threw myself down along the horse's left side until I was hidden from the bowman completely. It was a trick I had practiced with this horse many times, for more than a year, and the only means the bowman had of countering it was to ignore me and shoot the horse. Fortunately, he did not. He may have wondered what happened to me, but by the time he stopped gawping I was past both him and his companion and my horse was galloping flat out. I swung myself back up into the saddle and leaned forward as his arrow belatedly flew by me, missing widely. I sighted between the animal's ears towards the dark line of trees that marked the outer edge of the forest wherein I knew I would be safe—safer by far, at any rate, than I could be in the open fields that flanked the river—and raked him with my spurs again.

No one tried to follow me, and an hour later I dismounted by a narrow, fast-flowing stream where I lay on my belly and thrust my face into the water, drinking greedily until I could drink no more. The water was cold enough to hurt, but I made no attempt to get up. Instead, I rolled my head from side to side, soaking my head completely and allowing, encouraging, the chill to keep me numb and thoughtless. When I could stand the cold no longer, I pushed myself up onto my knees and tried to stand but fell instead to all fours in the streambed and vomited up what I had drunk.

I do not remember crawling out of the water, but some time later, it might have been an hour, perhaps even longer, I awoke on my side on the thick grass beneath one of the trees on the stream's bank.

There was a thought, a memory, already in my mind when I regained consciousness that afternoon on the bank of the stream. It was the memory of my own hubris, less than two weeks earlier. When I had learned that Bishop Germanus had great things in mind for me once I had reached sixteen, I had thought of myself as being a man and a warrior dedicated to the greater glory of God. Now the recollection of it made me cringe with shame.

For more than five years I had been among the top students of the Bishop's School and for the last three of those years I had shown myself to be virtually unbeatable in the military training segments of our daily curriculum. I had worked hard and trained constantly, cherishing dreams of being a warrior, until now, today, and my first opportunity to put my training to the test. And I had fled in terror.

A voice in my mind told me to stand up and be a man, but I tucked my hands into my armpits and drew up my knees, hunching myself into a ball and moaning aloud as I allowed myself at last to recall what had occurred. Again and again and yet again I watched poor Lorco's face explode and saw him falling sideways into death, and yet, insanely, I was concerned above all else that he was about to land on his head and injure himself on the hard ground. And then I began to recall the bodies of our companions as I had seen them last: Harga, falling backwards from his saddle, arms spread, an arrow in his skull and another protruding from beneath his left arm; Gorgo, our finest bowman, sprawled face down in the dust of the path, his buttocks thrusting comically into the air because of the way he had fallen; Dirk the huntsman and Alith and Fistus, his runners, and Petrarch the cook, who always liked to see his food being killed, and limping Tamarus, his assistant—all of them recognizable in a single glance, all of them dead within moments of each other, reduced to shapeless huddles of drab, bloodied rags.

And then my mind showed me images of our attackers, more than a score of them, perhaps as many as two score; screaming men, many of them aiming bows, many more running headlong, leaping and charging towards me and whoever else might have survived their first murderous onslaught. They had appeared from nowhere, it seemed, springing fully formed from the earth itself like the demons spawned by the dragon's teeth in the ancient tale that had terrified and thrilled me as a child. As I thought about them at greater length, however, it became obvious that they had been lying waiting for us among the osier willows on the riverbank and in the long grass on the left side of the path we followed.

Harga had committed the primary sin of military command by riding through unknown territory without advance guards, and all of us had paid a fearsome price for his neglect, lulled into false security by the knowledge that we were following close on the heels of our own forces. Once more I saw the ground around our group covered suddenly with leaping, running men, and I heard their screams and felt again the terror that had consumed me. And I saw myself again kicking one man in the head and then spurring my horse into a dead run, running and running and running as far and as fast as the beast would carry me.

I had fled from battle at the first hint of hardship, and the knowledge burned in me like gall. I howled aloud and squirmed and kicked on the hard ground, weeping and wailing like an infant and wriggling and groveling in abject misery, and had I been able to dig like a mole I feel sure I would have buried myself alive, then and there.

Eventually, however, these convulsions of grief and self-loathing died away and gave place to emptiness and a great, welling, leaden- hearted misery. I lay motionless after that for a long time, mentally identifying and exploring the aches and pains I had imposed upon myself in lying there. I had used up all my store of tears and my whole chest felt hollow, like an inflated bladder, weightless and yet filled somehow with tension and unbearable loss.

I must have fallen asleep at some point during all of that, because the next thing I became aware of was a deep, explosive snort and the sound of a hoof stamping close by my head. I jerked awake to see my horse looming above me, and the sight of him filled me with another wave of guilt and shame, for I saw that I had left him fully saddled and bridled. I sat up, groaning with the effort, and pushed myself to my feet, where I stood swaying for a time before I felt strong enough to reach out and take hold of his reins. As soon as he felt the reins in my hand, he snorted again, softly this time, blowing air through his velvet muzzle, and raised his head high, pointing his ears forward and then standing motionless, as though waiting for me to mount. I stroked his neck and muzzle, then slapped him on the neck and told him to wait while I returned to the water to kneel and drink again from the stream, more decorously this time and knowing that I would not be sick again. I dried my mouth with the back of my hand and swung myself up into the saddle, where I sat for a time, simply looking about me and trying to decide what I ought to do. My horse whickered again, his ears twitching as he waited for my signal, and as I bent forward slightly to lay my hand on his neck, my outstretched fingers touched the top of the heavy bronze helmet that hung from the hook on my saddle bow.

I stopped, staring at the helmet and remembering the sight of Harga's hanging from his saddle in the same way. Had he been wearing the thing, the arrow that pierced his skull would probably have been deflected and he might never have had to fling up his arm the way he had, exposing his vulnerable armpit to the second arrow that struck him. I suddenly felt the welcome weight of my own full- body armour: a complete front and back cuirass of hammered bronze, with matching kirtle of armoured straps and, strapped to my riding boots, long, heavy leg greaves that came up above my knees. A long-bladed spatha hung by my left side from a sword belt that crossed my chest, and a matching dagger hung in a sheath from my right hip.

I should not have been wearing armour that day at all, as a member of a hunting party, but Harga had been in a vengeful frame of mind that morning and had ordered both of us, Lorco and me, to wear full armour as a punishment for being what he called "insolent smart-arses." He had discovered, the previous afternoon, that the wagon we were using to transport the deer we killed also contained the four chests belonging to Lorco and me containing our clothing and our armour. They had been loaded in Auxerre when we joined the Lorco expedition to ride south with them. Harga had thought it highly amusing to make us undo the bindings and unpack our chests and to display all our goods and possessions to the others in the hunting party. He took a malicious pleasure in trying to humiliate us that way, but we, having spent the previous five years living in communal quarters with close to a hundred other boys, saw nothing belittling in what he made us do, because in fact the complete display of everything brought from home into the Bishop's School was a ritual event, undergone by every new boy who joined the scholastic ranks, and in those instances much, including anything edible, was confiscated by the older boys. Of course, we said nothing about that to Harga.

And so this day we had worn armour in the blazing sun. But we had been on our best behaviour for most of the day and even Harga had not objected—in fact he had pretended not to see—when we took off our helmets. A new wave of grief swept over me as I realized belatedly that Lorco, too, might still be alive had he been wearing his helmet. My eyes awash again with sudden tears I would have sworn a moment earlier could not be in me, I gulped and swallowed and bent forward to take the heavy bronze helmet from its hook and slide it over my head. The sudden hollow hush that surrounded me as the leather-lined cask sank over my ears was unexpectedly peaceful, and the restriction of vision caused by the broad, hinged cheek protectors forced me to sit straighter and turn my head when I wanted to look at anything that did not lie directly ahead of me. I unsheathed my spatha and held it up to where I could see the blade, unbloodied, unsullied, unused. I sheathed it again and kicked my horse forward in a walk.

As soon as the animal began to move, my body adjusted to its motion and my thoughts became cogent and cohesive. I glanced up at the sky and saw the sun low in the west, its glare trapped behind all but the edges of a swollen cloud. The attack, I knew, had occurred before noon, so I must have been lying by the stream in the woods for several hours. By this time, I knew, the enemy, whoever they had been, must have collected their booty and moved on long since. But what they might have done with the bodies of my companions was an unknown that I had to address. Bad enough that I had run away from the killing field in the first place, but if I were to return to the Duke as the sole survivor of this debacle, I would have to bring information on the aftermath of the slaughter, verifying and reporting the names of the others dead . . . besides his son.

My jaws began to ache with the strain of gritting my teeth together as I made my way back to the scene by the riverside, following the deeply gouged tracks of my earlier, headlong flight without difficulty and growing increasingly aware that if anyone had chosen to follow me they would have had no trouble finding me and killing me.